"You wish to stay so much; what do you mean to do here?"
Talk to you, oblique lady, and wonder what lies behind the painted veil.
"Look at the island, if you'll let me. I found the statue of a faun near the beach," elaboration implied 1 should lie: "Someone told me there was an old shrine here."
"Ah!" She barked. It was apparently a laugh. "No one," she said, "told you anything about this place."
I was at a loss. Did she know what she said? "Frankly then, I romantically hoped there might be."
"Unromantically, there is not. No shrine. No temple. My father bought the faun in a shop, in Athens. A tourist shop.
He had vulgar tastes, but he knew it, and that has a certain charm, does it not?"
"Yes, I suppose it does. Your father-"
She cut me short again.
"The woods cover all the island. Except for an area behind the house. We grow things there, and we keep goats and chickens. We are very domesticated. Very sufficient for ourselves. There is a spring of fresh water, but no votary. No . genius loci. I am so sony to dash your dreams to pieces." 'r '. It suggested itself to me, from her tone of amusement, from little inflections in her shoulders, that she might be enjoying this, enjoying, if you like, putting me down as an idiot. Presumably visitors were rare. Perhaps it was even fun for her to talk to a man, youngish and unknown, though admittedly never likely to qualify for anyone's centrefold.
"But you have no objections to my being here," I pursued. "And your father?"
"My parents are dead," she informed me. "When I employed the plural, I referred to him," she gestured, a broad sweep of her hand, to the monster on the lawn, "arid a woman who attends to the house. My servants, my unpaid servants. I have no money anymore. Do you see this dress? It is my mother's dress. How lucky I am the same fitting as my mother, do you not think?"
"Yes…"
I was put in mind, suddenly, of myself as an ambassador at the court of some notorious female potentate, Cleopatra, say, or Catherine de Medici.
"You are very polite," she said, as if telepathically privy to my fantasies.
"I have every reason to be."
"What reason?"
"I'm trepassing. You treat me like a guest."
"And how," she said, vainglorious all at once, "do you rate my English?"
"It's wonderful."
"I speak eleven languages fluently," she said, with offhanded boastfulness- "Three more I can read very well."
I liked her. This display, touching and magnificent at once, her angular theatrical gesturings, which now came more and more often, her hair, her flat-waisted figure in its 1940's dress, her large, well-made hands, and her challenging me with the mask, saying nothing to explain it, all this hypnotised me.
I said something to express admiration, and she barked again, throwing back her blonde head and irresistibly, though only for a moment, conjuring Garbo's Queen Christina.
Then she walked down the steps, straight to me, demonstrating something else I had deduced, that she was only about an inch shorter than I.
"I," she said, "will show you the island. Come."
She showed me the island. Unsurprisingly, it was small.
To go directly round it would maybe have taken less than thirty minutes. But we lingered, over a particular tree, a view, and once we sat down on the ground near the gushing milk-white spring. The basin under the spring, she informed me, had been added in 1910. A little bronze nymph presided over the spot, dating from me same year, which you could tell in any case from the way her classical costume and her filletted hair had been adapted to the fashions of hobble skirt and Edwardian coiffeur. Each age imposes its own overlay on the past. Behind the house was a scatter of the meagre white dwellings that make up such places as the village on Daphaeu, now plainly unoccupied and put to other uses. Sheltered from the sun by a colossal cypress, six goats played about in the grass.
Chickens, and an assortment of other fowl, strutted up and down, while a pig, or pigs, grunted somewhere out of sight.
Things grew in strips and patches, and fruit trees and vines ended the miniature plantation before the woods resumed.
Self-sufficiency of a tolerable kind, I suppose. But there seemed, from what she said, no contact maintained with any other area, as if the world did not exist. Postulate that a blight, or harsh weather, intervened, what then? And me old satyr, how long would he last to tend the plots? He looked two hundred now. which on the islands probably meant sixty. 1 did not ask her what contingency plans she had for these emergencies and inevitabilities- What good, after all, are most plans? We could be invaded from Andromeda tomorrow, and what help for us all then? Either it is in your nature to survive, somehow, anyhow, or it is not.
She had well and truly hooked me. of course. If I had met her in Athens, some sun-baked afternoon, I would have felt decidedly out of my depth, taken her for cocktails, and foundered before we had even reached the dinner hour. But here. in this pulsing green bubble of light and leaves straight out of one's most irrational visions of the glades of Arcadia, conversation, however erratic, communication, however eccentric, was happening. The most inexplicable thing of all was that the mask had ceased, almost immediately, to bother me. 1 cannot, as I look back, properly account for this, for to spend a morning, a noon. an afternoon, allowing yourself to become fundamentally engaged by a woman whose face you have not seen, whose face you are actively being prevented from seeing, seems now incongruous, to the point of perversity. But there it is. We discussed Ibsen. Dickens. Euripides and Jung. I remembered trawling anecdotes of a grandfather, mentioned my sister's jewellery store in St. Louis, listened to an astonishing description of wild birds flying in across a desert from a sea. 1 assisted her over rocky turf. flirted with her, fell excited by and familiar with her, all this with her masked face before me. As if the mask, rather than being a part of her, meant no more than the frock she had elected to wear, or the narrow-heeled vanilla shoes she had chosen to put on. As if I knew her face totally and had no need to be shown it, the face of her movements and her ridiculous voice.
But in fact, I could not even make out her eyes, only the shine in them when they caught the light, flecks of luminescence but not colour, for the eyeholes of the mask were long-lidded and rather small. I must have noticed, too, that there was no aperture in the lips, and this may have informed me that the mask must be removed for purposes of eating or drinking. I really do not know. I can neither excuse nor quite understand myself, seen in the distance there, with her, on her island. Hartley tells us that the past is another country.
Perhaps we also were other people, strangers, yesterday. But when I think of this, I remember, too, the sense of drawing I had had, of being magnetised to that shore, those trees, the nostalgia for a place I had never been to. For she, it may be true to say, was a figment of her nostalgia, as if I had known her and come back to her. Some enchantment, then. Nol Medusa's island, but Circe's.
The afternoon, even through the dapple L'Apr^s-midi d'ua Faune effect of the leaves, was a viridian furnace, when we regained the house. I sat in one of the wicker chairs on the terrace, and woke with a start of embarrassment to hear her laughing at me.
"You are tired and hungry. I must go into the house for a while. I will send Kleia to you with some wine and food."
It made a bleary sense, and when I woke again it was to find an old fat woman in the ubiquitous Grecian island black- demonstrably Kleia-setting down a tray of pale red wine, amber cheese and dark bread.
"Where is-" I realized I did not know the enchantress's name.
In any event, me woman only shook her head, saying brusquely in Greek:**No English. No English."
And when I attempted to ask again in Greek where my hostess had got to, Kleia waddled away leaving me unanswered. So I ate the food, which was passable, and drank the wine, which was very good, imagining her faun-buying father putting down an enormous patrician cellar, then fell asleep again, sprawled in the chair.